matters,' he says, 'to an extreme--so that when I have any little vexation, it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles.' And then by way of accounting for his having failed of late to see much of the Reynolds sisters in Little Britain, he lays bare his reasons for thinking himself unfit for ordinary society and especially for the society of women:-- I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women--at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure Goddess, my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not. I have no right to expect more than their reality--I thought them ethereal above men--I find them perhaps equal--great by comparison is very small. Insult may be inflicted in more ways than by word or action. One who is tender of being insulted does not like to think an insult against another. I do not like to think insults in a lady's company--I commit a crime with her which absence would not have known.... I must absolutely get over this--but how? the only way is to find the root of the evil, and so cure it 'with backward mutters of dissevering power'--that is a difficult thing; for an obstinate Prejudice can seldom be produced but from a gordian complication of feelings, which must take time to unravel, and care to keep unravelled. And then, as to his present doings and impressions:-- I should not have consented to myself these four months tramping in the highlands, but that I thought it would give me more experience, rub off more prejudice, use me to more hardships, identify finer scenes, load me with grander mountains, and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among books, even though I should reach _Homer_. By this time I am comparatively a Mountaineer. I have been among wilds and mountains too much to break out much about their grandeur. I have fed upon oat-cake--not long enough to be very much attached to it.--The first mountains I saw, though not so large as some I have since seen, weighed very solemnly upon me. The effect is wearing away--yet I like them mainly.